Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Jews don’t count

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  • At the NEU trans and non-binary network seminar

    From the Times:

    Members of Britain’s largest teaching union hosted an event where teachers were told that there is no legal definition for biological sex.

    The claims were made at an online seminar held last month by the trans and non-binary network of National Education Union (NEU) members to advise non-trans “allies” how to support transgender rights.

    The event, entitled “Solidarity in Practice: Building Sustainable and Effective Cisgender Allyship”, attracted more than 150 people including teachers and other trade union members.

    It was organised after the Supreme Court judgment in April, which ruled that the definition of a “woman” and “man” under the Equality Act 2010 related to biological sex.

    In one presentation, given by a member of the LGBT network at the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, attendees were told: “There is no legal or even scientific definition of ‘biological sex’.”

    It was claimed in one presentation that under the country’s equality laws, transgender people can use the facilities — such as lavatories and changing rooms — that corresponded with the gender they identified as rather than their biological sex.

    A summary of the claims states: “The Supreme Court ruling excluded trans voices. But thanks to the Equality Act 2010 we can use correct gendered facilities. For now, no law has changed. Anyone enforcing discriminatory policy on trans people is breaking the law.”

    This advice appears to go directly against the interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the equality watchdog, on how organisations should interpret the Supreme Court ruling.

    It does go against the law. They're flat-out wrong.

    Naomi Cunningham, a barrister, said the “trans activist network” at the NEU was among a large number of bodies that are “misrepresenting” the law “because they don’t like the outcome of the Supreme Court judgment”.

    Cunningham, the chair of the campaign group Sex Matters, added: “It is both wrong and dangerously irresponsible to suggest that the exclusion of trans-identifying people from opposite sex facilities is breaking the law.

    “Schools have safeguarding responsibilities for the children in their care, and the risks of letting teenagers self-identify into opposite-sex facilities should be obvious.

    .“The NEU needs to rein in extremists within its networks and ensure that guidance given at any official event is compliant with the law.”…

    Dr Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, said: “It is extremely concerning that a teacher’s union, presumably including science teachers, is hosting an event where ridiculous claims that there is no scientific definition of sex are being made.

    “‘Male’ and ‘female’ refer to two different types of people with two different patterns of anatomy, and how those different bodies function in reproduction.

    “This biological definition of sex in humans is authoritative, supported by biology textbooks, academic publications and medical consensus statements.”

    The NEU’s national executive body voted last month to campaign to allow male-born trans teachers who identifed as women to continue to use female lavatories.

    The motion, called “trans rights are human rights”, said the Supreme Court ruling “contradicts human rights and dignity of trans and other gender-diverse staff and encourages discrimination, harassment and hate crimes”.

    According to reports of the vote, it commits the union to “call on employers to support the right to use gendered facilities which match gender identities”.

    Some coughing and spluttering from the NEU:

    A NEU spokeswoman denied that the “Solidarity in Practice” event was an official union meeting.

    She said: “The NEU has not yet provided advice to its leadership members, or union reps, since the Supreme Court ruling.

    “The NEU is considering the implications and wants the Department for Education to provide helpful support to schools. “The NEU recognises that employers in schools and colleges must comply with legal requirements.

    “All employers continue to be bound by the Equality Act 2010 and the Supreme Court ruling means they need to take proportionate steps to avoid discrimination against staff but school leaders can find it tricky to navigate the balancing of these rights.

    “Leaders need to aim to make sure women feel supported in the workplace and that any staff who are trans also feel supported.”

    It reminds me of Jeremy Corbyn reacting to accusations of antisemitism. The response was always that he opposed all types of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. He couldn't mention antisemitism without Islamophobia. Just couldn't do it. Now these people can't talk about discrimination against women without bringing in discrimination against "staff who are trans". They can't do it.

  • Due to his “transgender” identity

    And again. From Reduxx:

    ANDRE-PATTERSON-JANIAH-MONROE-1392x783

    A male convicted killer has been allowed to remain at a women’s prison in Illinois despite disturbing allegations that he raped a female inmate. Department of Corrections officials have attempted to have Andre Patterson returned to a men’s prison, but have been unsuccessful due to his “transgender” identity and support from activist groups….

    Patterson has a long history of violence recorded since his teenage years. In 2006, he murdered his cellmate with his bare hands after the two men had been detained together for a period of just three days. At the age of 17, Monroe strangled to death Kimani Muhammad, then 31, in Cook County jail.

    In 2019, after beginning to identify as transgender, Patterson received support from the Uptown People’s Law Center, MacArthur Justice Center, and ACLU to sue the state for transfer to a women’s prison. The suit has been ongoing for six years, but Patterson was transferred shortly after it was filed.

    Of course he was. It's such a wonderful progressive cause, putting men like this into women's prisons. 

  • What if

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    Full text:

    Bethan McKernan just left her post as Jerusalem correspondent and she wrote a big 'leaving' article. In it she describes being in Gaza 3 days before Oct 7.

    She describes seeing a large amount of Hamas fighters out in the open training conducting 'military drills'. She goes on to say 'none of us had ever seen so many' out in the open and training before.

    So here is my question. Why wasn't this a news item? If journalism is independent in Gaza and if your journalist saw a large *unprecedented* training exercise by Hamas terrorists…

    Why wasn't it reported? Why didn't you tell the world?

    I will answer for you. It wasn't reported for two reasons.

    1. Because reporting in Gaza is neither free, nor independent – and if you wanted continued access to Gaza – you could not write ANYTHING to annoy Hamas. Not that you would ever tell your readers that.

    2. You are an anti-Israel rag that doesn't care what is happening if you cannot demonise Israel with it.

    Now think about this. What if you had reported it? And what if it had been seen by Israeli intelligence? And what if one of the officers had brought it to the attention of a superior officer? And what if one of them had thought it odd and thought it worth looking at more closely?

    Three days before Oct 7. What if.

    Bethan McKernan's article here.

     

  • “Lincoln woman”

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  • In Brussels

    Full text:

    This is what Belgium’s radical pro-Hamas scene looks like today. Not calls for peace, not solidarity with the oppressed—but street theatre glorifying slaughter. A movement that praises terrorism in the open, pressures anyone who speaks out, and treats mass murder as a political identity. I’ve been threatened by this same current for telling the truth about Hamas’s crimes—against Israelis, yes, but also against Palestinians like me.

    They didn’t come to Europe looking for freedom. They came looking for a platform—one where they could spread Hamas’s ideology without paying the price. Where they could chant for more dead civilians, and call it culture. Where they could reenact massacres and get protected by the language of “rights.”

    Europe needs to decide whether it still has red lines. Because when executions are simulated in a public square and no one intervenes, no one condemns, no one draws a line—that’s not free expression. That’s surrender.

  • Antisemitic violence only makes Zionism more appealing

    Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic:

    Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers.

    In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel’s founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel’s population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing base.

    The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as “Zionists.” The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel’s most reliably conservative constituencies.

    Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries.

    Even in Athens. Why would Jews put up with this level of threat now that they have their own country?

  • Homophobic conversion therapy wrapped up in rainbow lies

    This is v good.

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  • Yesterday in Athens

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  • Fifth Avenue 1912

    Manhattan ca. 1912. "Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street, New York." Looking north. Busy, busy, busy. 

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photos: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]